The Etymology of "Batshit Crazy"

I rather like the term “batshit crazy.” It has a fantastic ring to it and telegraphs very well the notion that the individual, group or entity being described is indeed not your common or garden crazy, but rather a level beyond madness’ ordinary limits.

Alas, its etymology does not point where I had hoped it would point. I was praying that a particular form of insanity descended upon spelunkers due to repeated inhalation of bat guano, but there appear only to be anecdotal citations in that direction, perhaps others who likewise wished it were so. It seemed the Occum’s razor for me, as in my native New England, the phrase, “crazier than a shit house rat” enjoys some popularity and indeed owes its etymology to the syndrome of rats who haunt poorly maintained outhouses being afflicted with violent and unpredictable personalities.

The term “batshit” began to appear as an equivalent to “bullshit” in military jargon of the 1950s, even showing up in that context in some printed material. Its attachment to “crazy” was not seen at that time, but it bears mentioning, as that coining of "batshit" as a single word appears to be its first, and documentation on it is solid.

An old expression for madness was “bats in the belfry,” the belfry of a church representing the head of a person, with the idea being that one’s mind was full of blind, winged night rodents, a metaphor of madness that carries with it the charm of grotesquerie, like a story by Poe or a drawing by Edward Gorey. The best guess then at the evolution of “batshit crazy” seems to be a gradual profaning of "bats in the belfry" via the incorporation of the previously familiar term “batshit” from its 1950s military usage.  And in this way, the expression as we know it stumbled to its feet.

There is a character in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove named Colonel “Bat” Guano (1964), an obvious reference to “batshit,” and Hunter S. Thompson used the phrase “batshit insane” in the Fear and Loathing books in the early 1970s. Between those two high-profile cultural usages, “batshit,” “batshit crazy,” and “batshit insane” came into common parlance, and have had waxing and waning popularity since, but thanks in no small part to the 2016 presidential race, all three are back and ready for action.

You Say ISIS, I Say ISIL, Let's Call the Whole Thing Off

A rose by any other name is still a rose, but is the same true of the terror world’s latest scourge, ISIS? Or ISIL? Or ISI? Or IS? Or DAESH? What’s in a name?

The winning appellation thus far has been ISIS, an acronym for the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (which is popularly understood by Americans to be Syria). Its predecessor, which called itself ISI (Islamic State of Iraq) grew from an offshoot of al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the Mujahedeen in Iraq, and a fun bunch of guys called Soldiers of the Prophet’s Companions.

By 2010, Jabhat Al-Nusra, a large Syrian opposition militia group, collapsed into ISI and the “S” was added for al-Sham. For Westerners, the last “S” in ISIS stands for Syria just fine with our usage and understanding. The more austere and stately IS stands for Islamic State, and while it sounds like the place where the B-student terrorists go to college, it is as acceptable in usage as ISIS, but for eyeball-grabbin’ newsertainment, ISIS has been the popular expression.

So why does President Obama insist on using ISIL in his addresses? ISIL is an acronym for Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant. The Levant refers to all of the countries that border the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea, which would additionally include Lebanon, Palestine, Israel and Jordan, and in the administration’s view, more accurately reflects the ambitions of Al-Baghdadi’s militia, as well as the nations that are most immediately vulnerable to its threat. Some component of the pundit class sees the president’s use of ISIL as unnecessarily obtuse.

Your final option is DAESH, which I understand is a real stinker as far as DAESH members are concerned. Secretary of State John Kerry prefers calling it DAESH, as it carries with it a very nasty dig. It too is an acronym, but for an Arabic phrase that is pronounced “al-Dawla al-Islamiya fi Iraq wa ash-Sham.” The actual meaning of the words are, “The Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham,” which is fine on paper, but when spoken, apparently DAESH sounds like the words that mean “the sowers of discord (Dahes),” or "one who crushes underfoot (Daes).”

A sower of discord can include a thief, an adulterer, or worst of all, an apostate, and apparently it drives these indiscriminate murderers wild with hatred and rage, but hey, what doesn’t? A DAESH spokesperson communicated through the AP in 2014 that they would, "cut the tongue of anyone who publicly used the acronym DAESH.”

So take your pick. Go full John Kerry-style and give a Wahaabist mullah the finger by using DAESH, or  follow the president’s lead and use the conspicuously contrarian ISIL. Perhaps you’d prefer to keep it short and sweet with IS, or stick with the popularly preferred ISIS. A rose by any other name is still a rose, and it is likewise so with deluded zealot assassins, so in my opinion, it matters not a fig.

As long as we are naming things properly, this is the real Isis.

Words That Ought to be Obsolete, But Aren't

Digital technology has made a lot of words obsolete, but perhaps even more interesting than those cluttering the digital dustbin are the words that despite their illogic persist in current parlance. Two that come to mind are taping and filming.

Not much is taped or filmed these days. Even major Hollywood studios have switched largely to digital formats, though a good bit of 35mm filming continues. Film provides a warmth and color range that many directors believe digital cannot quite deliver. Nonetheless, expense and convenience rule the day and film is in the preponderate minority.

Likewise in audio recording there exists a school of thought that 2” magnetic tape, notably for drums, delivers a natural compression that can only be captured on analog media. Even so, most recordings released these days are recorded in digital formats.

With common popular recording, on cell phones or using contemporary recording devices, almost no one is filming to videotape or recording to audiotape. Yet, the process of digital audio and video capture is quite commonly referred to as taping or filming. Other such misnomers include dialing a phone number and doing paperwork in your office that never ends up on paper. Can you think of any others?

Regime and Regimen, a Brief Reminder

Just a quickie: regime and regimen. Confusing the two is a rookie mistake, which is all the more reason not to make it. While both regimes and regimens can be cruel and brutal, one is a routine undertaken at regular intervals and the other is a structure of authoritative governance that controls a group of people.

A good way to remember the distinction is that you would not likely say Kim Jong Un’s regimen is strict, as he is rather a portly little butterball these days. Regimens often refer to exercise schedules, though not necessarily. They can be regular, repeated routines in any category, often in pursuance of personal betterment, for instance academics, musical instrument prowess or learning Korean.

 

Psychopath versus Sociopath: Is There a Difference?

There were two school shootings on John Lennon’s 75^th birthday. All you need is love, right? And a nice stash of high-powered firearms, a lifetime of discontent and a dose of sociopathy, or is it psychopathy? You hear the terms tossed about pretty liberally by armchair psychiatrists in the wake of such incidents, the words often being used interchangeably, when in fact, psychopaths and sociopaths differ in significant ways.

Psychopaths are Lady Gaga fans, not because her music is in any way insane, but rather because of her huge hit, “Born This Way.” Psychopaths are hardwired for their mischief. They have lived a disturbed life since birth, one side effect of which is that they become very good at it. They often hold down jobs and present a façade of normalcy to the outside world. Having experienced negative reactions to their impulses from a very early age, they learn how to survive in society by creating a normalized persona behind which lurks a demented viewpoint. Ted Bundy is a classic psychopath.

A sociopath, however, comes to his iteration of antisocial personality disorder experientially or through an aggregating sense of having been wronged by society. Psychopaths and sociopaths share lawlessness, deception, aggressiveness and an inability to feel remorse or guilt, but sociopaths are not nearly as “good” at it, not having had to incorporate their antisocial impulses into a presentable façade over the course of a lifetime. Robert John Maudsley, the inspiration for the Hannibal Lecter character, was severely beaten throughout his childhood and was (according to Maudsley) raped by his father, largely theorized to be the source of his sociopathy, one that led him to a condition in which the mere presence of another person excited an internal obligation to kill that person.

There is of course much more information available on this distinction, and naturally, the two have plenty of shared traits, but it’s probably best not to toss those two terms around without a bit of consideration. After all, you don’t want to get on the wrong side of a psychopathic grammarian who resents your mischaracterization.

Mixed Metaphor Mashup

One of the most joyful ongoing pursuits of any linguaphile is the hobby of collecting of mixed metaphors.  Just yesterday a friend averted a political discussion that could have gotten ugly by saying she didn’t want to open up a whole new bag of worms, to which I replied that she was just reaching into her old can of tricks.

Mixed metaphors come in a variety of shapes. A common one, like the examples cited in the opening paragraph, is the act of attempting to say a common comparative phrase, but  substituting one component of the phrase with a different word. The best ones are unintentionally funny or in some way ring the bell of irony.

I recall a good one from Daniel Menaker’s fine novel, The Treatment, in which the protagonist’s Indian therapist refutes his patient’s claim that all single women in New York are emotional wrecks by suggesting, “There are plenty of fish in the sea hitting on all eight cylinders.” Non-native speakers often utter them to great comic effect.

You might be getting your ducks on the same page or Hillary’s poll numbers might be dropping through the roof, but if you truly hold your seat to fire, even if your eyes have never set foot on a mixed metaphor, you can have more fun than a hand-basket full of monkeys collecting them.

"Live Free or Die," a Brief History

“Live Free or Die” is the state motto of my native New Hampshire and it is without even a remote challenger the best of all of the state mottos. But where did it come from? Like so many good things, it came in the mail.

General John Stark, New Hampshire’s most celebrated Revolutionary War figure, composed the phrase in a toast denoting the anniversary of a victorious battle, but he was too ill to deliver it in person so he sent it in a letter to be recited at the event. “Live free or die,” his toast read. “Death is not the worst of all evils.”

That second part would look great on the license plate too.

As a small child growing up in Manchester, New Hampshire, I have distant memories of playing in Stark Park, marveling at the stacked, painted cannonballs and concrete-filled Revolutionary War cannon, imagining a battle with General John leading the charge and me loading cannonball after cannonball into these great guns and annihilating rows of redcoats. Had I known at six years old that it was he who had uttered those words that had at first frightened and then invigorated me, I might have joined ROTC in grammar school.

The identical phrase, “Vivre libre ou mourir,” was popular during the French Revolution, so it is likely that our man Stark lifted it from them. “Live Free or Die” was accepted as the state motto in 1945 and it immediately appeared on the new emblem and soon enough, on the license plates, which as the great Bill Morrisey pointed out, are often made by prison inmates.

New Hampshire. The gnarly motto, the craggy White Mountains, the inhospitable winters, the now-fallen Old Man of the Mountain, all conspire to make New Hampshire’s mind-blowing beauty and deeper-than-wide conception of community a little rough-hewn, something you have to do a little work for, but once you do that work and experience the richness of living in New Hampshire, then you know a depth of human experience I have never felt anywhere else. So a big “Live Free or Die” shout-out to all of my friends back home in New Hampshire from me out here in California, where our state motto is “Eureka.”